As Seen in Vanity Fair's August 2006 Issue!
As Seen in US News & World Report's September 11 Fifth Anniversary Issue!
As Seen in Time Magazine's September 11, 2006 Issue!
As Seen in Phoenix New Times' August 9, 2007 Issue!

Sunday, November 11, 2007

Loose Change the Final Insult: The First Hour

This may be a bit redundant with what Pat says, but those are the risks of a group blog. First I have to say, this movie is boring the hell out of me. If they can't come up with something more interesting than this I am considering giving up debunking entirely. Give me some lizard people or something for God's sake. They should have named this movie "Loose Change: Press For Truth", because apparently Dylan has been so chastened by people proving him wrong that he has watered down this movie to nothing more than "Well, something happened, I don't know what it was, it seems a little weird and I would like more information."

That doesn't mean he isn't still completely dishonest. They still continue with the hijackers still being alive thing, commenting "Curiously, a number of them were reported to still be alive following the attacks." Well, OK, if that is true, THEN WHY AREN'T ANY OF THEM IN YOUR FREAKING MOVIE? I mean come on, this is the 4th version of your movie, you claim you spent over a million dollars, why are you still repeating claims from mid-September 2001 without doing any freaking investigation of your own?

The part on the Pentagon is just bizarre. Dylan starts out the chapter by stating "Pentagon authorities will deny that the building had anti-aircraft defense [sic]", and then just drops the subject. OK there, now could you provide any evidence that it did? Why did you even bring up the subject?

In this version they are actually honest enough to point out the 90 feet of damage to the first floor of the Pentagon that didn't exist for the first 3 movies, although they later forget that when they claim that some people argue that the hole was too small. This section becomes completely agnostic in that they spend 5 minutes showing all of the evidence indicating that AA77 hit the Pentagon, provide no evidence that it was something else, and then proclaim that nobody really knows. Somehow I got the impression that Dylan's heart just isn't in this anymore.

The dishonesties don't stop there, they say that Hani Hanjour came to the US to become a commercial airline pilot, but didn't finish any courses, without mentioning that he already had a commercial license. The also make the false claim that Saeed Al Ghamdi was a Saudi Air Force pilot. Not true at all, he was a 21 year old college dropout, Ziad Jarrah was the pilot hijacker on United 93.

I am still amazed how after years of research and studying this, they still don't have even a basic understanding of much. For example they refer to "Back on October 23rd 2000, the Pentagon conducted MASCAL, mass casualty exercise which simulated a Boeing 757 crashing into the building". But the exercise isn't named MASCAL, MASCAL simply describes the type of exercise it was, it is something that is quite commonly done in the military. This is like saying "the Boston Red Sox conducted 'batting practice'".

Update: Pat already touched on this, but I wanted to point out something. They spend probably 5 minutes on the alleged Pakistan ISI connection, an amazing amount of time to discuss what amounts to one article in an Indian newspaper 6 years ago. They do a masterful job of hiding this though, by repeating the charge in various ways, and saying that the FBI and the Wall Street Journal confirmed this story, they make it sound like this allegation was reliably investigated and confirmed from multiple sources. It wasn't though, the FBI only "confirmed" this story in the sense that this was who the Times of India sourced in the first place, and all the Wall Street Journal did was reference the Times of India story. So rather than coming from multiple sources, it all boils down to the Times of India and their anonymous claim.